Old Press Clippings

Ever since Mlle. Sagan’s first novel demonstrated that a precocious young girl’s views of life, love and the adult world had an irresistible appeal… the search has been on… for an “American Sagan”… [But this] is probably a misnomer for Miss Moore… In fact, some sections of her novel make Mlle Sagan look a trifle prudish. Which brings to mind the uncomfortable thought that not very long ago, it would have been regarded as shocking to find girls in their teens reading the kind of books they’re now writing.

She may well be part of a trend among publishers to start a new cycle of youth problem novels, as told by the young – a kind of literary parallel to the more overt delinquencies of the switchblade hoodlums.

. . . what really is interesting here is not the book itself, but the great fuss being made about it . . . isn’t this just part of our love for the immature, the childish? We are fascinated, having long been at our wits’ end, taking note of every expression of human life that promises us a ‘spiritual ‘– please forgive the use of the word in this context- and somehow ‘juvenile delinquent’ power. We lack spiritual strength, we have failed, we have become weak — let us now try our lot with the juvenile delinquents and the beatniks . . .zeit.de/1957/24/cocktail-traurigkeit

The 18 year old college student Pamela Moore has written a confessional novel — German title “Cocktails for Breakfast” — of the genre where decadent college girls are awash in alcohol and seek out love adventures at an early age.. When the author came to Paris on her first European tour, the French reporter asked her the stereotypical question of whether she shared her heroine’s morals, which the American denied, and the French took her at her word.

The writers whom I decry know nothing of sex in the context of actual love… Sex is portrayed by them as a stupefying pleasure mechanism for which heterosexual or homosexual relationships can serve equally well.

I made some remark which attempted to minimize her book and classify it among the ridiculous efforts of silly female writers who turned untrue confessions into novels. She parried my thrust and said that her parents, an editor and a novelist, disappointed she was not a boy, sent out announcements of her birth which read: we wanted an editor, but got a novelist.

Special thanks to withhiddennoisefor finding and digitizing some of the clippings below.

Historical Editions

Since its publication in 1956, Chocolates for Breakfast has been translated into a dozen languages, including French, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew, German, Japanese and Swedish. It was a bestseller in the US, Italy and France. In the US, the Bantam paperback edition went through 11 printings and sold over a million copies in the 1950s and '60s. The 18th edition of the Italian translation, Cioccolata a Colazione, lists the total number of copies sold in Italy as of 1966 at 408,000. Cioccolata remained continuously in print in Italy through the early 2000s.

Search this Site

Recent Reissues

In July of 2013, Chocolates for Breakfast was reissued in the U.S. by Harper Perennial. Since then, editions have been published or announced in the following countries / by the following publishers: